Two recent pamphlets from Jim Goar’s Catfish Press arrived in my mailbox together without a zip-code–a real testament to the great Japanese postal system, I think. Jim also did not include much else this side of the sealed envelope and the stamp, but I suspect that information about how to obtain these publications, prices, etc., can be found at www.pastsimple.org/catfishfront.html.

“letters toward jim” by matthew langley tempts this reviewer to search out some biographical hints to aid his undertanding of the text. Hmmm. First, both Jim and Matthew are alums of the Naropa Writing program, and on the penultimate page of the pamphlet we see what appears to be a picture of the author standing next to Jim Goar dressed in a uniform with Hangul characters on a military helmet. Veeerrrry interesting. This leads one to suspect that perhaps these letters to Jim just might be tiny to brief poems that are addressing the editor of Catfish Press.

Dear Jim,

Evel Knievel’s still big on Ebay
but ready to die.
“I can’t wait
to meet God, ask Him
why He didn’t make me
faster, why all this pain.
He knows I’m not evil.”

He was a big eater.

Just the kind of information a poet living living in South Korea might want to hear from a poet living in America (or maybe in Prague, Seoul, or Baltimore, MD. as the bio note indicates since we’re not quite sure what span of time these letters represent and the letters themselves are undated.) But hey–here’s another:

Dear Jim,

Did you ever hear of the umbrella bird?
The feathers on its head look
like an umbrella. Fine feathers
make fine birds. Birds know this.
That is why they hurt themselves so often.
Some like it better than sugar.

The second pamplet (slightly larger) is by Richard Froude, who has learned that stacking simple sentences results in an aura of disconnection, schizophrenia, metaphysical dread even. His The Margaret Thatcher Trilogy runs the scales of this device:

Question Three

An engineer leaves a train at 72 miles per hour.
It is raining in St. Ives.
Henry 8th seems glum today. He is lonely and talking to statues.
Beatrice looks at him through stone eyes. She says nothing.
Steve locates the Conservative Club off Lime Street.
Jane has escaped from Catholicism and is running through a cemetery.
Her stone legs drag.
Margaret and I are napping together.

Oh my dear! Oh my dear! The disjunctions continue beyond the de Chirico train station and into the surreal:

Margaret Thatcher has grown into mythology, her skin of wrought iron.
Wings have sprouted, organic and batlike.
She has no need for feathers.
She has no need for old eyes. She deals instead in sound.
[Phase Five: Strategic Intelligence]

You get the picture, right? Back in the 1980’s the editor of Poetry Motel wrote a series of poems about Ronald and Nancy Reagan that included a flashy poem about Ronald buggering the former-beauty-queen-actress-cum-First Lady. Nothing that interesting happens in these poems, but the satirical mechanism is the same. In fact, as I read through these poems I continued to experience flash-backs and “where did I see that before?” moments. Not that Thatcher doesn’t deserve all the thwacks that Froude gives her, but we require crisp, snappy cracks of the whip, and sometimes we simply find ourselves walking down memory lane instead of leaning forward cupping our ears for the moans and cries–or laughs. But that could just be us succumbing to old age.

Is there a Naropa “School” of writing? After encountering the products of more than a few Naropa graduates, I’m almost tempted to say so. I remember the days when we used to identify the typical Iowa Poem by its lack of contractions, stilted rhetoric, and never-ending references to stones. Is the unthinkable starting to happen in 2007?

Anyway, Jim Goar’s a buddy, and these pamphlets are efforts worthy of your purchase and consideration.